WunderBlog Archive » Category 6™
Category 6 has moved! See the latest from Dr. Jeff Masters and Bob Henson here.2016 Holiday Shopping Guide for the Weather Enthusiast
Hunting for that special something for a budding meteorologist or a lifelong weather enthusiast? You can’t go wrong with an atmosphere-related gift. Below is the 2016 installment of our traditional holiday shopping guide.
Holiday books for the weather and climate science enthusiast
Jeff’s pick: “The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy”
If you're wondering why so many politicians and news sources deny that dangerous human-caused climate change is real, and you want a relatively short and easy-to-read summary of the issue, look no further than “The Madhouse Effect” (Columbia University Press, 2016), by Penn State climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann. Published in 2016, “The Madhouse Effect” is illustrated with about 50 cartoons by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Tom Toles of the Washington Post, whose cartoons manage to be hilarious and sobering at the same time. Dr. Mann is a leading climate scientist, and is also author of "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars", which I reviewed in 2012. The book is separated into eight sections:
Science: How it Works
Climate Change: The Basics
Why Should I Give a Damn
The Stages of Denial
The War on Climate Science
Hypocrisy--Thy Name is Climate Change Denial
Geoengineering, or “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”
A Path Forward
The text is easy to understand--written at a level for anyone with a high school science education. Tom Toles’ excellent cartoons add some pizzaz, so that the book is not boring. At just 150 pages, “The Madhouse Effect” is of a very digestible length, and should take only two hours or so to peruse. The book concludes with words that are now far more timely than Mann and Toles could have known when the book was published earlier this year: ”This is our home. It’s time to start acting like it.” The paperback version of “Madhouse Effect” is $15.51 from Amazon.com. I give "Madhouse Effect" five stars out of five. The book would be a nice companion to my recommendation from last year’s holiday gift guide, ”Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change -- The Visual Guide to the Findings of the IPCC,” by Dr. Mann and fellow Penn State professor Lee Kump, published in 2015.
Bob’s pick: “Hurricane Pioneer: Memoirs of Bob Simpson”
Few in the world of atmospheric science have enjoyed a career as varied, illustrious, and extended as the one carved out by Dr. Robert Simpson, who died in late 2014 at the age of 102. We’re lucky that Dr. Simpson took the time to document his busy life in detail, as told in “Hurricane Pioneer” (AMS Books, 2015).
It wasn’t obvious at first that Bob Simpson would devote much of his professional life to tropical cyclones. In fact, he spent the latter 1930s as a successful high school music and physics teacher in his native Texas, before taking a 67% pay cut to join the U.S. Weather Bureau in Brownsville as a novice observer. World War II opened big doors for Dr. Simpson, as he trained at the legendary University of Chicago Institute of Meteorology, then went on to work in the Miami Weather Bureau office with famed forecaster Grady Norton.
This memoir includes background on Dr. Simpson’s forays into early hurricane hunting and “piggyback” research, and on his tenure as the second director of the National Hurricane Center (though with so much to cover, the book seldom lingers on any one event or period). Even as his involvement in tropical meteorology blossomed, Dr. Simpson had a hand in other crucial developments, including a network of Texas radars that served as the prelude for the first national weather-radar network as well as the establishment of the Mauna Loa Observatory, now the world’s gold-standard location for tracking the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Although there’s little meteorology in the first third of the book, we do learn how Dr. Simpson’s childhood in Corpus Christi, Texas, was shaped by the trauma of a deadly 1919 hurricane. There is plenty of insight on Dr. Simpson’s personal and professional relationships, including his 45-year marriage to Dr. Joanne Simpson, an eminent atmospheric scientist in her own right and the first woman to achieve a doctorate in meteorology. Dr. Simpson is candid about the downsides of his globetrotting career path, including an early divorce, and he closes the book with reflections on how his spiritual and scientific paths interrelated. Interestingly, the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale—perhaps his best-known achievement, created with civil engineer Herbert Saffir--gets only two paragraphs, including a self-deprecating comment from Dr. Simpson on the scale’s naming in 1975: “This designation was by committee action, not by our request, and a bit of an embarrassment to me.” Available from the AMS Bookstore for $25 ($20 for members and students), “Hurricane Pioneer” gets five stars for the gentle eloquence of its narrator and for its unique perspective on a 20th-century life in atmospheric science.
A Personal Weather Station: yes!
Every serious weather enthusiast deserves a Personal Weather Station (PWS) in their backyard! Not only can you enjoy seeing what the weather is in your backyard, you can share the data with everyone else on the Internet by uploading to the wunderground Personal Weather Station network, which boasts data from more than 200,000 stations. You don’t need to have a computer on all the time to collect the data and send it to the Internet--a WeatherBridge device will keep the data flowing to the Internet even when your computer is turned off. A full list of wunderground-compatible PWS models, software, and add-ons like the Ambient WeatherBridge is available from our Personal Weather Station buying guide page, including helpful background on how to choose among the possibilities based on your needs.
Jeff’s picks:
An economical PWS choice: Netatmo
The Netatmo Weather Monitor ($179) contains a unique set of sensors to monitor your indoor and outdoor living environment and wirelessly transmits all your data to your desktop or mobile device. Optional add-ons include a rain gauge ($79) and wind gauge ($99.99). The Netatmo app pulls your station’s indoor and outdoor measurements into clear and comprehensive dashboards, graphs, and notifications.
A mid-range PWS choice: Davis Vantage Vue
The Davis Vantage Vue + WeatherBridge Package is $625 from ambientweather.com. Combine the convenience of WeatherBridge with Davis Instruments' Vantage Vue™ station, which is fully featured, highly accurate and affordably priced.
A high-end PWS choice: Rainwise
I have had a Davis Vantage Pro2 in my backyard for the past eight years, and have been very happy with it, but I also recommend the RainWise Direct to Weather Underground Package, $999 from rainwise.com. The RainWise RapidFire™-enabled weather station doesn't need a PC to upload data to us, and with an ultra-fast refresh rate of every 3-5 seconds, new data is updated instantly.
Weather Underground T-shirts and hoodies
If you’ve ever craved the cool WU apparel featured on The Weather Channel’s #wutv program (6 - 8 PM EST weeknights), you can now share your WU fandom at a sweet discount. The Weather Underground store has an assortment of T-shirts and hoodies available for 10% off through January 1 when you use this promotion code: WUHOLIDAY10.
Connect your favorite services with IFTTT
Here’s a holiday gift for yourself, friends, and family that won’t cost a dime. Weather Underground is now the exclusive weather provider for IFTTT, a freely downloadable platform that allows apps and connected services to work together seamlessly. Applets within IFTTT call on various features of the apps you already use to create new capabilities. For example, each WU app already allows you to activate “push” notifications of severe weather alerts. Applets in IFTTT go even further: it can notify you if WU is predicting rain for your area tomorrow, or remind you to put on sunscreen whenever the UV index is high. There’s even the ability to call on localized sunset data from WU to automatically transition your home-based connected devices to nighttime mode (including Hue lights, Nest thermostats, and WeMo light switches). See the IFTTT weather page for many other nifty WU-related options, and learn more about the IFTTT-WU collaboration in a press release issued December 8 by The Weather Company.
This week we’re in San Francisco at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting, the world’s largest gathering of Earth and space scientists. We’re also keeping an eye on the cold wave to be reinforced through the week across much of the central and eastern U.S. We will be back with a new post by Wednesday at the latest.
Jeff Masters and Bob Henson
Holiday books for the weather and climate science enthusiast
Jeff’s pick: “The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy”
If you're wondering why so many politicians and news sources deny that dangerous human-caused climate change is real, and you want a relatively short and easy-to-read summary of the issue, look no further than “The Madhouse Effect” (Columbia University Press, 2016), by Penn State climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann. Published in 2016, “The Madhouse Effect” is illustrated with about 50 cartoons by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Tom Toles of the Washington Post, whose cartoons manage to be hilarious and sobering at the same time. Dr. Mann is a leading climate scientist, and is also author of "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars", which I reviewed in 2012. The book is separated into eight sections:
Science: How it Works
Climate Change: The Basics
Why Should I Give a Damn
The Stages of Denial
The War on Climate Science
Hypocrisy--Thy Name is Climate Change Denial
Geoengineering, or “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”
A Path Forward
The text is easy to understand--written at a level for anyone with a high school science education. Tom Toles’ excellent cartoons add some pizzaz, so that the book is not boring. At just 150 pages, “The Madhouse Effect” is of a very digestible length, and should take only two hours or so to peruse. The book concludes with words that are now far more timely than Mann and Toles could have known when the book was published earlier this year: ”This is our home. It’s time to start acting like it.” The paperback version of “Madhouse Effect” is $15.51 from Amazon.com. I give "Madhouse Effect" five stars out of five. The book would be a nice companion to my recommendation from last year’s holiday gift guide, ”Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change -- The Visual Guide to the Findings of the IPCC,” by Dr. Mann and fellow Penn State professor Lee Kump, published in 2015.
Bob’s pick: “Hurricane Pioneer: Memoirs of Bob Simpson”
Few in the world of atmospheric science have enjoyed a career as varied, illustrious, and extended as the one carved out by Dr. Robert Simpson, who died in late 2014 at the age of 102. We’re lucky that Dr. Simpson took the time to document his busy life in detail, as told in “Hurricane Pioneer” (AMS Books, 2015).
It wasn’t obvious at first that Bob Simpson would devote much of his professional life to tropical cyclones. In fact, he spent the latter 1930s as a successful high school music and physics teacher in his native Texas, before taking a 67% pay cut to join the U.S. Weather Bureau in Brownsville as a novice observer. World War II opened big doors for Dr. Simpson, as he trained at the legendary University of Chicago Institute of Meteorology, then went on to work in the Miami Weather Bureau office with famed forecaster Grady Norton.
This memoir includes background on Dr. Simpson’s forays into early hurricane hunting and “piggyback” research, and on his tenure as the second director of the National Hurricane Center (though with so much to cover, the book seldom lingers on any one event or period). Even as his involvement in tropical meteorology blossomed, Dr. Simpson had a hand in other crucial developments, including a network of Texas radars that served as the prelude for the first national weather-radar network as well as the establishment of the Mauna Loa Observatory, now the world’s gold-standard location for tracking the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Although there’s little meteorology in the first third of the book, we do learn how Dr. Simpson’s childhood in Corpus Christi, Texas, was shaped by the trauma of a deadly 1919 hurricane. There is plenty of insight on Dr. Simpson’s personal and professional relationships, including his 45-year marriage to Dr. Joanne Simpson, an eminent atmospheric scientist in her own right and the first woman to achieve a doctorate in meteorology. Dr. Simpson is candid about the downsides of his globetrotting career path, including an early divorce, and he closes the book with reflections on how his spiritual and scientific paths interrelated. Interestingly, the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale—perhaps his best-known achievement, created with civil engineer Herbert Saffir--gets only two paragraphs, including a self-deprecating comment from Dr. Simpson on the scale’s naming in 1975: “This designation was by committee action, not by our request, and a bit of an embarrassment to me.” Available from the AMS Bookstore for $25 ($20 for members and students), “Hurricane Pioneer” gets five stars for the gentle eloquence of its narrator and for its unique perspective on a 20th-century life in atmospheric science.
A Personal Weather Station: yes!
Every serious weather enthusiast deserves a Personal Weather Station (PWS) in their backyard! Not only can you enjoy seeing what the weather is in your backyard, you can share the data with everyone else on the Internet by uploading to the wunderground Personal Weather Station network, which boasts data from more than 200,000 stations. You don’t need to have a computer on all the time to collect the data and send it to the Internet--a WeatherBridge device will keep the data flowing to the Internet even when your computer is turned off. A full list of wunderground-compatible PWS models, software, and add-ons like the Ambient WeatherBridge is available from our Personal Weather Station buying guide page, including helpful background on how to choose among the possibilities based on your needs.
Jeff’s picks:
An economical PWS choice: Netatmo
The Netatmo Weather Monitor ($179) contains a unique set of sensors to monitor your indoor and outdoor living environment and wirelessly transmits all your data to your desktop or mobile device. Optional add-ons include a rain gauge ($79) and wind gauge ($99.99). The Netatmo app pulls your station’s indoor and outdoor measurements into clear and comprehensive dashboards, graphs, and notifications.
A mid-range PWS choice: Davis Vantage Vue
The Davis Vantage Vue + WeatherBridge Package is $625 from ambientweather.com. Combine the convenience of WeatherBridge with Davis Instruments' Vantage Vue™ station, which is fully featured, highly accurate and affordably priced.
A high-end PWS choice: Rainwise
I have had a Davis Vantage Pro2 in my backyard for the past eight years, and have been very happy with it, but I also recommend the RainWise Direct to Weather Underground Package, $999 from rainwise.com. The RainWise RapidFire™-enabled weather station doesn't need a PC to upload data to us, and with an ultra-fast refresh rate of every 3-5 seconds, new data is updated instantly.
Weather Underground T-shirts and hoodies
If you’ve ever craved the cool WU apparel featured on The Weather Channel’s #wutv program (6 - 8 PM EST weeknights), you can now share your WU fandom at a sweet discount. The Weather Underground store has an assortment of T-shirts and hoodies available for 10% off through January 1 when you use this promotion code: WUHOLIDAY10.
Connect your favorite services with IFTTT
Here’s a holiday gift for yourself, friends, and family that won’t cost a dime. Weather Underground is now the exclusive weather provider for IFTTT, a freely downloadable platform that allows apps and connected services to work together seamlessly. Applets within IFTTT call on various features of the apps you already use to create new capabilities. For example, each WU app already allows you to activate “push” notifications of severe weather alerts. Applets in IFTTT go even further: it can notify you if WU is predicting rain for your area tomorrow, or remind you to put on sunscreen whenever the UV index is high. There’s even the ability to call on localized sunset data from WU to automatically transition your home-based connected devices to nighttime mode (including Hue lights, Nest thermostats, and WeMo light switches). See the IFTTT weather page for many other nifty WU-related options, and learn more about the IFTTT-WU collaboration in a press release issued December 8 by The Weather Company.
This week we’re in San Francisco at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting, the world’s largest gathering of Earth and space scientists. We’re also keeping an eye on the cold wave to be reinforced through the week across much of the central and eastern U.S. We will be back with a new post by Wednesday at the latest.
Jeff Masters and Bob Henson
Lower 48 #snow cover more than double the area of 1 year ago. Didn't reach 41.8% areal coverage last year until Dec. 27, per NOHRSC. pic.twitter.com/3T3Oj0Jzgv
— Jonathan Erdman (@wxjerdman) December 12, 2016
The views of the author are his/her own and do not necessarily represent the position of The Weather Company or its parent, IBM.